Princeton University classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta will be joined by Brown University classicist Johanna Hanink to discuss what, if anything, the study of the ancient Mediterranean has to offer us in this specific moment of calamity – the result and sum total of many earlier moments and histories of calamity, most notably the violences of the transatlantic slave trade and Euro-American settler-colonialism. In place of the knee-jerk rush in some circles to ostensibly emancipatory or liberatory uses of the “classical” past, they will consider the benefits of what Charles Mills has termed “the illumination of Blackness” or what Jacoby Adeshei Carter has singled out as a pressing need for canon-builders in philosophy: “a lively active oppositional set of communities of inquiry.”